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This is a series of posts for my CS3216 project, you can find the original post here.

Bubble is made up of 4 main components:

  1. Backend, this handles all the chat connections, i.e. socket.io connections, database
  2. Web app, this is https://app.getbubblechat.com
  3. Landing page, https://getbubblechat.com
  4. Android app

All these components have a separate repository and can be deployed individually.

I work primarily on the backend, and early on in the development I decided to host the backend online in an EC2 instance. This has various advantages: my team mates can now develop the front end without running the back end server, and can also interact with an instance already populated with dummy data.

During peak development periods, I would deploy the backend multiple times a day — as my team mates develop, they find bugs or have suggestions on how to improve the back end, and I would code it up and deploy. This motivated me to come up with a deployment strategy that is, in my opinion: simple and easy.

Here is the current iteration of my deployment script that lives in the production box. (Unfortunately I did not check this into version control, so I cannot share how this script evolved from a simple 2 liner into the 10 lines, which still isn’t that much that has primitive supports for backup.) The deploy script is relatively straightforward, and I have annotated this script heavily for the purpose of this post.

# deploy.sh
# goes into the right directory, and pwd for sanity checking
cd bubble
pwd
# pull master (we also have travis-ci set up for master)
# https://travis-ci.org/CS3216-Bubble/bubble
# and install any new deps (npm-shrinkwrap to lock deps)
# https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/shrinkwrap
git pull
npm install --no-progress
# remove any old backups lying around
if [ -f ./dist-prev ]; then
  rm -rf ./dist-prev
fi
# build fails when we lock fsevents
# the problem occurs because I develop on a mac,
# and shrinkwrap generates a fsevents version for mac
# but our prod instance is a fedora, and it grabs the wrong
# version of fsevents.
# since npm-shrinkwrap.json doesn't change much, I manually edit it.
# https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/2679
grep 'fsevents' npm-shrinkwrap.json && (echo "remove fsevents from shrinkwrap" && exit 1)
# back up current working dist, allows for easy recovery
# in case the new build causes problems
cp -r dist/ dist-prev/
# finally build, this will compile our app into dist/
npm run build
# reserve and serve are npm run scripts that call into forever,
# it restarts a script if running, else it starts it
# https://github.com/foreverjs/forever
npm run reserve || npm run serve

My deployment step is then:

ssh bubble # ssh into production box, set this up in .ssh/config
./deploy.sh # the same script as above

I could have added a script to do automatic rollback as well, but I figured I don’t do rollbacks often enough (have only done it once so far). Besides, we have travis-ci set up anyway so we will know when master is broken.

This deployment strategy is simple, easy to understand, and has worked really well for my team. I use the same strategy for the other components as well, a simple script that does git pull, runs any build step, and optionally copies built files into another directory (such as the landing page so nginx can serve those files). How does your team do deployment?